No Text Chat in Anthem? Maybe Not According to Creative Director

Anthem Creative Director Brenon Holmes has taken to Reddit to try to explain why the game may not feature any text-based chat channels. The team is facing an FCC deadline to implement accessibility options in game that can include full text-to-speech options. As a result, Anthem will probably exclude even the most basic text chat channels including zone, clan or general.

Holmes wrote:

The main challenge is that there are a bunch of additional accessibility options that we are required to implement. This increases the cost of these sorts of features. As an example, I'm pretty sure one of the things we need to support is TTS (text-to-speech) for any in-game text based chat. This sort of thing unfortunately complicates what might normally be an easier feature. Right now, we're still figuring out what is feasible to do.

This is a feature that has been in nearly every multiplayer game since multiplayer games began. The alternative to the lack of text-based chat channels appears to be twofold: Players may be forced to use group finders and they may be forced to use voice chat. To many, this may be unacceptable. 

Redditors are understandably dubious about Holmes' explanation:

Not only is it a fundamental feature, it's an extremely simple way to make the world feel more alive.

In Destiny, the game feels MORE dead (cuz it's pretty dead, tbh. especially the shard sizes...) because there's no one talking at all... there's no global chat channels (eg /global, /zone, etc), and they've only dribbled out local chat ( /say) and guild ( /clan). Hell, guild chat was only last week.

We'll keep eyes on this story as Holmes has said that the team is actively looking for a solution.

What do you think of this? Leave us your thoughts in the comments.

Via VG247